Why I Started Writing About Marketing in Public
A personal blog about marketing is a strange thing to start when you have spent two decades doing the work rather than writing about it. I built agencies, turned around loss-making businesses, managed hundreds of millions in ad spend, and watched the industry from the inside long enough to form some firm opinions. Writing them down felt like a different kind of risk entirely.
The Marketing Juice exists because I got tired of reading marketing content that was either too surface-level to be useful or too academic to be actionable. Most of what gets published is written by people who have never run a P&L, never sat across from a CFO defending a budget, and never had to explain why a campaign that looked great in the deck performed poorly in market. I have done all of those things. Writing about them honestly felt worth doing.
Key Takeaways
- Personal blogs written from genuine experience carry a different weight than content produced for content’s sake, and readers can tell the difference.
- Writing about marketing in public forces a level of intellectual honesty that internal meetings rarely demand.
- The most useful marketing perspective comes from people who have been accountable for outcomes, not just outputs.
- A blog is not a portfolio. It is a way of thinking out loud with enough discipline to be useful to someone else.
- The marketing industry has too much content and too little candour. The gap is worth filling.
In This Article
What Made Me Start Writing
I have been in rooms where very smart people said very confident things that turned out to be wrong. I have also been in rooms where someone said something quietly accurate that nobody acted on because it was not wrapped in enough enthusiasm. The gap between those two experiences is where most marketing decisions get made, and it is not a comfortable place to operate.
Early in my career at Cybercom, I was dropped into a brainstorm for Guinness within my first week. The founder had to leave for a client meeting mid-session and handed me the whiteboard pen on his way out. I remember thinking: this is going to be difficult. Not because I did not have ideas, but because I had not earned the room yet and I knew it. I did it anyway. That experience taught me something about the difference between confidence and credibility, and how you build the latter by doing the work rather than performing it.
Writing publicly about marketing forces the same kind of accountability. You cannot hide behind a meeting room or a deck. The argument either holds up or it does not. That discipline is one of the reasons I started.
If you are interested in the broader strategic context for what I write about here, most of it sits within the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub on The Marketing Juice. That is where the thinking connects to commercial outcomes rather than staying at the level of tactics.
Why Most Marketing Content Falls Flat
There is a specific kind of marketing article that gets written thousands of times a year. It opens with a statistic that may or may not be accurate, makes three to five points that are broadly true but operationally useless, and closes with a call to action dressed up as a conclusion. I have read thousands of them. I have probably commissioned a few in a previous life.
The problem is not that the content is wrong. It is that it is written from a position of no accountability. Nobody who writes “brands need to be more authentic” has to explain what that means when a CMO asks them to define it in a brief. Nobody who writes “data-driven marketing is the future” has to sit in a room and explain why the data said one thing and the market said another.
I spent years judging the Effie Awards, which are specifically about marketing effectiveness rather than creative craft. Seeing behind that curtain changes how you read marketing case studies. The work that wins is rarely the work that sounds the most impressive in a pitch. It is the work that connected a real business problem to a real audience in a way that moved something measurable. That is a harder story to tell, which is probably why most content does not bother.
Tools like Hotjar’s growth loop frameworks are useful precisely because they are built around observable behaviour rather than assumed intent. The same principle applies to writing. Useful content is grounded in what actually happens, not what the theory says should happen.
What I Am Actually Writing About
The Marketing Juice is not a trade publication and it is not a personal diary. It sits somewhere between the two: commercially grounded thinking from someone who has operated at the intersection of strategy, growth, and execution for a long time.
The topics I keep coming back to are the ones that matter most in practice and get the least honest treatment in public. Positioning. Measurement. The difference between demand capture and demand creation. Why channel strategy defaults to comfort rather than logic. How growth requires new audiences, not just better conversion of existing ones.
I grew iProspect from a team of 20 to over 100 people and moved it from a loss-making position to a top-five agency in its category. That kind of growth does not happen by optimising what already exists. It happens by making hard decisions about where to compete, what to stop doing, and how to build a proposition that is genuinely differentiated rather than just differently worded. I write about those decisions because they are the ones that actually determine outcomes, and they are rarely covered with any honesty in marketing media.
BCG’s work on commercial transformation and go-to-market strategy makes a similar point from a consulting angle: the companies that grow are the ones that make deliberate choices about where and how to compete, not the ones that try to do everything better. That framing resonates with what I saw operating agencies across more than 30 industries.
The AI Problem, and Why It Keeps Coming Up
I cannot write a personal blog about marketing in 2025 without addressing AI, because it is the thing everyone is either overclaiming or underthinking.
A few years ago I sat through a presentation from a major holding company about their AI and machine learning platform for personalised creative. The claimed performance uplifts were extraordinary: 90% reductions in cost per acquisition, conversion rates tripling. I asked them to walk me through the baseline. They had taken creative that was genuinely poor and replaced it with creative that was marginally less poor. The AI had not done something remarkable. It had corrected a problem that should not have existed in the first place.
That is not an AI story. That is a low-baseline story dressed up as an innovation story. The distinction matters because if you believe the AI story, you invest in the platform. If you understand the baseline story, you invest in fixing your creative process first and then decide whether the platform adds anything on top of that.
I write about AI the same way I write about everything else: with the question of whether it is solving a real problem or creating the appearance of solving a problem. The answer varies. Sometimes it is genuinely useful. Sometimes it is a very expensive way to automate mediocrity.
Resources like Semrush’s analysis of growth hacking examples are worth reading not because every example is transferable, but because they show the range of what actually works across different business contexts. The pattern that emerges is usually simpler than the narrative around it.
What a Personal Blog Is For
There is a version of a marketing blog that is essentially a lead generation tool wearing editorial clothing. I have seen enough of them to recognise the format immediately: the content is useful enough to attract readers but not specific enough to reduce the need for the author’s services. Every article ends with an implicit pitch.
That is not what I am trying to do here, and I think readers can tell the difference.
A personal blog is most useful when it reflects genuine thinking rather than performed expertise. That means being willing to say when something did not work, when a received wisdom is wrong, and when the honest answer to a marketing question is “it depends, and here is what it depends on.” Those are harder articles to write than listicles and how-to guides, but they are the ones that age better.
I have managed clients across financial services, FMCG, technology, retail, healthcare, and a dozen other sectors. One thing that becomes clear after enough years across that many categories is that most marketing problems are variations on a small number of underlying problems: unclear positioning, shallow audience understanding, measurement that tracks activity rather than outcomes, and channel decisions made by habit rather than logic. I write about those problems because they keep appearing regardless of industry, budget size, or how sophisticated the marketing team thinks it is.
Creator-led go-to-market approaches, for instance, are increasingly relevant across categories that would not have considered them five years ago. Later’s framework for going to market with creators is a useful practical reference for teams thinking about how to structure those relationships. But the strategic question of whether creator-led distribution solves your actual problem is one that has to be answered before the tactical question of how to execute it.
Why Candour Is Rare in Marketing Writing
Marketing is an industry that is unusually good at marketing itself. The awards, the case studies, the conference talks, the LinkedIn posts: all of it tends toward the positive. Success stories are packaged and shared. Failures are quietly absorbed and rarely written about.
That creates a systematic bias in what the industry learns from. If the only published evidence is success stories, and if those success stories are written by the people who want credit for the success, then the lessons being drawn are incomplete at best and misleading at worst.
I have turned around loss-making businesses. I have also made decisions that did not work as planned. Both categories are instructive, and the second category is arguably more so. Writing honestly about both is harder than writing about wins, but it is more useful to someone trying to make better decisions in their own work.
The Crazy Egg breakdown of growth hacking approaches is a good example of content that is honest about what works and what does not, rather than presenting every tactic as universally applicable. That kind of intellectual honesty is more useful than confidence without qualification.
Growth strategy, done properly, is not a collection of tactics. It is a set of choices about where to compete, how to win, and what to measure. The articles on this blog, across the growth strategy section of The Marketing Juice, try to reflect that. Not every piece will be relevant to every reader’s situation, but the underlying logic should hold regardless of context.
What I Am Not Going to Write About
There are categories of marketing content I have no interest in producing. Trend roundups that repackage press releases as insight. Predictions that are vague enough to be unfalsifiable. Content that exists to demonstrate that the author is aware of a topic rather than to say something useful about it.
I am also not going to write about marketing as though it exists in isolation from business. Marketing is a commercial function. It exists to create and sustain demand for products and services in a way that generates profitable revenue. When it loses sight of that, it becomes expensive theatre. I have seen enough expensive theatre to last several careers.
BCG’s research on go-to-market strategy in complex product categories is instructive here. Even in highly regulated, technically complex markets, the fundamentals of go-to-market strategy are the same: understand the audience, define the value clearly, choose the right channels, and measure the right things. The complexity of the context changes the execution, not the logic.
That is the framework I bring to everything I write here. Not a methodology. Not a proprietary model with a name and a diagram. Just a consistent way of asking whether the marketing decision being made is connected to a real business outcome, and whether the evidence being used to make it is honest.
Who This Blog Is For
Senior marketers who are tired of content that treats them like beginners. Marketing directors who have to defend budgets and need sharper thinking, not more jargon. Agency leaders who want a perspective from someone who has run the kind of business they are running. In-house teams who are trying to make better decisions with imperfect information and limited time.
It is not for people who want validation for decisions they have already made. It is not for people who want a list of tools that will solve their problems without requiring them to think harder. And it is not for people who find it threatening when someone questions the received wisdom of the industry.
The practical toolkit side of growth strategy matters, and I will cover it where it is relevant. But tools without strategic clarity are just expensive ways to do the wrong thing faster. That tension is something I will keep coming back to, because it is one of the most common failure modes I have seen across twenty years and hundreds of clients.
If you have read this far, you probably already know whether this is a blog worth following. I am not going to tell you it will change how you think about marketing. I will just keep writing things that are worth reading, and let you decide.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
